А, the letter a

History

А is a letter of the Cyrillic script and stands first in the modern Russian alphabet. It commonly represents an open central unrounded vowel, written /ä/ in phonetic notation and described as halfway between the pronunciation of a in cat and the pronunciation of a in father. The Cyrillic letter А is romanized using the Latin letter A.

On a handwritten page this letter will normally appear in Russian cursive rather than in the block letters of printed material. Russian cursive is the handwritten form of the modern Russian Cyrillic script, and most handwritten Russian, in personal letters and in schoolwork alike, is written in it; in Russian schools most children are taught to write in this script from first grade. Unlike Latin handwriting, which ranges from fully cursive hands to hands that closely resemble printed type, and where idiosyncratic mixed systems are common, it is standard practice to write Russian almost exclusively in cursive.

That cursive was developed during the 18th century on the base of skoropis, the earlier Cyrillic rapid or running script, which was in turn the chancery hand of the 14th to 17th centuries and descended from the older Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav. It became the handwritten counterpart of the so-called civil, or Petrine, printed script of books.

Documents written in skoropis itself are harder going. Each scribe had his own handwriting and his own peculiarities in forming and grouping letters, letter shapes vary depending on their neighbourhood, and the script carries a large number of ligatures and abbreviations. For correct reading it is necessary to compare unclear places with parts of the same text that have already been read.